Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo on Friday, a deal that could shake up the competitive and lucrative market for online advertising.

You can read the full article from CNN here.

I personally think this will be a good thing for Affiliates. Yahoo and Microsoft are both known for having better conversion rates than the Big G, however, alot of affiliates don’t take the time to work with all three search engines.

If Yahoo and Microsoft combine, it could make it easier for affiliates to work with only two major players than with three. Of course I have no idea if Microsoft would continue to have 2 separate advertising platforms or if they would combine them and only have one.

Also, if compnay is able to threaten Google, I would say Microsoft would be that company simply because of the size of the company and the amount of money they have.

This will definitely be something I’ll be hoping happens. Hopefully, Yahoo is smart enough to take the offer!

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According to a story over at Jensense, it appears that Microsoft has begun testing their ContentAds service on publisher sites.

Microsoft ContentAds has apparently been showing up on Digg.com and also Microsoft has been of course testing them on their own sites like Facebook.

It seems that currently the ContentAds only appear when the browser is using Internet Explorer. I’ve tried refreshing several times with firefox and couldn’t get them to show up, which Jen mentioned, but I just wanted to double check for myself. I saw them fine when using IE7 and basically they look like most of the other content ads out there except for the fact that they don’t say Ads by Microsoft or anything like that. On Digg.com they simply say Sponsored Links when I saw them.

Digg.com if you remember signed a contract with MSN a while ago entering into an agreement for Microsoft to supply ads for digg. However, currently it seems they (digg) are rotating MSN ads with Kanoodle.

So what does this mean for Affiliate Marketers? Well quite simply, if you have the basics of running a successful ppc campaign on the search networks only, you should consider trying the content networks out with Google, Yahoo, and hopefully very soon MSN. You hear alot of horror stories about the content networks and people losing alot of money, however, if you use these systems the correct way and really take the time to learn them, they can really increase your earnings. Find out what keywords are converting, do some testing of targeting specific websites and see if you can’t get the search engine’s content networks to work for you! Your missing out by not giving it a try at least!

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